


The Island

by Frayach



Category: Queer as Folk (US)
Genre: Character Study, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-09-10
Updated: 2012-09-10
Packaged: 2017-11-13 22:36:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 939
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/508464
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Frayach/pseuds/Frayach
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>At some point, history has to stop repeating itself.</p><p> </p><p>  <img/></p>
            </blockquote>





	The Island

**Author's Note:**

> I'm pretty nervous; this is my first QaF fic and I haven't finished watching the show. The LJ Version is [here](http://frayach.livejournal.com/99851.html).

The Famine Years clawed their way through Ireland, leaving behind furrowed fields of rotting potatoes and long scars from the scratching and scrabbling of millions of hands. Those who could left for America. Those who couldn’t died in the ditches between the ribs of their lazy beds, their mouths stained green with grass. For seven years, Ireland’s old and dying waved from the shore to their young and strong as the coffin ships left the ports. They’d sold everything they had for the cost of passage for their sons and daughters, and as the sails disappeared from the horizon, they prayed they’d never see their children again except in heaven. Ireland’s emerald fields had become nothing but the shamrock-covered graves of cherished dreams.

Sharks swam in the ships’ wakes, awaiting the next dead body. By the time they could see Lady Liberty’s torch, a quarter of the passengers had died. From Castle Garden, they poured into the slums and factories of the City. Whole families lived in small windowless rooms. Air and light became strangers. A clean suit or dress became distant memories. The only things that didn’t stink of the sewers and boiled cabbage were the whisky and the votive candles. Manhattan Island swarmed with rats and half-clothed children and maudlin drunks singing of the Ould Green Sod.

When the suffocating rooms and the demands of wives and children became too much, the men went west, following the veins of the railroads etching themselves through the landscape. From New York City to Philadelphia and then on to the stockyards of Chicago, thrusting into the Appalachians and emerging in Ohio, leaving behind the bodies of the overworked and underfed and now and then depositing the living in the growing slums of Scranton, Allentown, Harrisburg, Altoona and Pittsburgh. Sometimes it was hard to tell the difference.

Of all the New Jersey and Pennsylvania slums, Pittsburgh was the worst. South Side, the Strip District, North Side, Oakland and Lawrenceville. The Prods worked at U.S. Steel, but the Catholics worked nowhere. The words “Irish Need Not Apply” really meant “Papists Need Not Apply.” The only difference between their new homes and their parents’ was the coal fog that blanketed Allegheny County so thick that the streetlights came on two hours before sunset. Phlegm was black, and the furnaces smoked all night like snoring dragons.

But then along came the Wops and the Poles, and suddenly it was respectable to be Irish. And then it became respectable to be Union and Democrat and hang out at the Hibernian halls drinking Jameson and Paddy’s and singing “Danny Boy.” They’d finally left behind Ireland the country, but Ireland the island was much harder to shake. It would take generations if it ever happened at all.

* * * *

On his good days, he was an island. On his bad days, he was a prick. Big shock. It’d been the same with his old man. It still surprised him that people expected something different. Bashing your head against a brick wall only gave you a concussion, yet a baffling number of people kept trying. Masochists. Whipping boys had never appealed to him, but he managed to put up with those who, despite all reasons not to, still loved him. They swam his oceans and battled the alligators in his moats and crawled onto his rocky shores breathless and bedraggled but still dauntless. It defied reason. It even defied nature. But then again, so did being queer.

There was nothing he wanted in the boxes of shit his dad had stacked in the basement and garage. He hadn’t looked, but he knew it all the same. The Kinneys’ journey would end in a suburban cul-de-sac. At least the patrilineal journey of bad marriages and dry cunts. Jerking off into a cup and squirting your come into a muff muncher with a turkey baster wasn’t the same thing as staggering home drunk and fucking a bitter wife. _His_ son hadn’t almost been an abortion. Maybe for the first time in generations, Gus would be the first child whose conception wasn't acknowledged by a drink in one hand and a clothes hanger in the other.

Let his sister keep whatever pathetic mementos the son of a bitch left behind. Unless the bastard had a bottle of 1987 Gelngoyne whiskey packed away somewhere, he wasn’t interested. But what were the chances of that? Old man Kinney never saw the bottom of a bottle he didn’t like.

His dad’s island had been a barstool, and his island was his king-sized bed. And his heart, of course, was even more remote. One of the Oileáin an Mhachaire off the coast of Kerry. You needed binoculars to see it even on a clear day. But he’d done one thing his father hadn’t had the balls to do: he hadn’t made promises he couldn’t keep.

From his office window, he can see where the Ohio branches into the Monongahela and Alleghany. The view faces west – in the direction that all his forefathers had looked since the first Famine ship set sail. The perspective leaves him standing in the V of the rivers, his office building a moated fortress. He can watch the sun set, but not rise. Fitting, really. There’s someone at home waiting for him. The thought is more terrifying than a tempest-tossed sea. For a moment he understands his father’s restless failures, but then, with a great effort, he pushes away the fleeting sense of kinship. He may be an island, but he won’t die a pathetic cancer-ridden old bastard too isolated to be reached – even by the most stupid and tenacious of loves.

**Author's Note:**

> Artwork by MrLizaveta.


End file.
